I got a stack of PCS that are very similar if not identical. Third gen i7, 8 gigs of ram, one terabyte hdd, all but one are the same HP model with the same motherboard, etc too. I upgraded the RAM in a few of them, and I have enough spare TB hard drives to put an extra in each. Two have Nvidia GeForce 210 gpus, and the unique one out of the bunch I’ll probably throw in a spare RX 570 I have.
But, what to do with them? Easiest answer is probably sell them all for $75 each but that’s not what we do here, right? Right now I’m assuming they all support w o l and I can easily set up ansible/awx for orchestration. I’m just looking for some fun experiments, projects, or actual uses for this Tower of PC towers
The at load efficency isn’t always the most important metric, depending on what you are using the machines for. If they are mostly idle, efficiency isn’t too bad. Many server tasks don’t load the CPU to the fullest anyway.
That’s true, if there’s no load then the difference isn’t much money.
I’m running a NAS, some game servers, a forgejo instance and a jellyfin server and more on my machine so it’s never truly idle and I forgot to think about that metric.
Slap a few zigbee smart plugs into your setup, cluster them in Home Assistant, and measure the total power draw. That’s what I do. It’s eye-opening… I learned that my 5800X3D/7900XTX gaming PC is capable of pulling exponentially more power than my entire server cluster. I shut that thing off when I’m not using it now haha.
My server has a gaming vm with gpu passthrough (6650 XT). With my vm powered on and idle the whole server draws about 60w-65w. Monitor not included.
Damn, that’s impressive. My rig idles at ~110W, but I’ve heard that the 5800X3D just…does that. Especially so with the fact that it has AMD’s beefiest GPU.
I went for a tiny Ryzen 7600 (no X), so it comes at the cost of a worse cpu and worse gpu. :)